outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

"similar to her boss and his recent experience: throat feeling like it's got broken glass shredding everything, difficulty drinking and eating"

yeah, this is me on day 8

Luckily my manager has been very clear that if you have any symptom that could possibly be covid, you should work from home.

Fortunately most of us are sensible enough to just stay home, regardless of the shaming or w/e, but we do have one employee that ALWAYS comes in sick. It drives me bananas.

Have you ever made a joke at their expense? I used to in the pre-COVID days about an employee who insisted on coming in with sniffles: "Don't you have a life? Stay home. It's a day off."

70 y.o. sis in law tested positive for the first time ever over the weekend, and a friend who's a metro bus driver finally caught it for sure last week.

xpost - yeah, many variations thereof, she's a gruff old schooler who just grumbles back, "are you gonna get my work done when I'm not here?!?"

Alfred, you are 100% correct of course, buy I have known and worked for a frightening number of middle managers who, even here in 2023, do not share that view. Not my direct manager, but another in my department even said in an all hands meeting, "I know it's that time of year, but if you can walk, you can come in to work". I was appalled that this was met with complete and utter silence by the two senior leaders in the room.

Point being, I've known some smart people with good intentions that feel either directly, or indirectly, brow-beaten, shamed or threatened to feel like they MUST come into the office.

Distressingly, yet another lesson that should have been learned from the pandemic, but has already been forgotten because... well, capitalism.

my wife is absolutely refusing to go into the office more than she needs to and she's the only one masking.

there's another (awful-sounding) executive at the company who had someone working for her, and this someone was masking because she had some concerns about a visiting relative, and she told this exec that. later in an all-hands meeting, the exec called out this employee and said, "why are you wearing that? take it off." i do believe that employee quit.

The Food and Drug Administration approved a new round of vaccines against COVID-19.

The vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer and its partner BioNTech were approved Monday for people 12 and older and under an emergency use authorization for children ages 6 months to 11 years old.

"Vaccination remains critical to public health and continued protection against serious consequences of COVID-19, including hospitalization and death," said Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, in a statement. "The public can be assured that these updated vaccines have met the agency's rigorous scientific standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality. We very much encourage those who are eligible to consider getting vaccinated."

sign me up

I'll never stop!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5wEfqFoX-Q

Leeeeeeeroy Jenkins

Glad to see eua for kids get the nod at the same time

Put it in my veins! (Literally)

I’ve got covid right now. Personal and anecdotal evidence def points to this thing hitting and not testing positive till a day or two later. So um if you’re suddenly fatigued and feel a bit crappy and test negative don’t tell everyone “it must be allergies” and go about your business. I’d say there’s an 87% chance you have covid and will test positive in a day or two. That’s my scientific analysis.

Best you can do is start quarantining least you can do is wear the mask and don’t exert yourself.

keep masking as much as you can y'all

yep

Same thing happened to me two weeks ago when I caught it. First day tested negative but had a feeling it was the 'vid. Sure enough tested negative the next morning.

Woo-hoo!

CVS Health® (NYSE: CVS) today announced that the updated COVID-19 vaccine recently authorized by the FDA and recommended by the CDC is now available at its CVS Pharmacy locations. Pharmacies will begin receiving the new vaccine today and will continue to receive inventory on a rolling basis throughout the week. All CVS Pharmacy locations are expected to have the vaccination in stock by early next week.

I made my Monday afternoon appointment.

booster booked for Saturday (along with flu). flying to Europe later that day, hopefully this isn't a bad idea.

and too early for the new shot?

ok, spoke to pharmacist: old vaccines are gone, supposed to get new supply sometime between "now" and Monday (this is a CVS).

A nurse friend tipped me off. Bivalent vaccines no longer available; new formula should be in some locations as early as Saturday. My CVS locations had Saturday appointments already.

iiuc authorization for the old shot was revoked, so a pharmacy should either give you the new shot or nothing.

Booked a Monday afternoon appointment at CVS

Dang! CVS just cancelled my appointment for tomorrow, as they don't yet have the new brew. Rescheduled for Saturday. I guess fingers crossed I'll have a sore arm that night?

Jabbed today!

Just waiting on my workplace. (They say they'll likely have it by the end of the week.)

Jabbed over the weekend (new covid in one arm, shingles in the other).

My son and I got covid and flu shots today at walgreens

Heads up if you have Kaiser: while their website says that they’ll have the updated vaccines “mid-September” their second tier customer support told me “probably October.” Since the Federal program ended, Kaiser billing now absolutely will not authorize any vaccination outside of their network however in the back-and-forth with them on the phone this wording seemed to make some headway. (be sure to use the phrase “file a grievance”)

“Hi, I would like to file a grievance. Kaiser has said that they would have the updated 2023 covid vaccines in mid-September. It is slightly after mid-September - everyone local has the new vaccine except for Kaiser. I know because I called them. In 48 hours I’m getting on a plane and won’t be back home for a month. I won’t be able to get the vaccine when I’m out of the state. Kaiser wont have the vaccine until October, so I’m forced to pay the full $199.90 for it because I don’t want to get sick and cause you (Kaiser) to lose even more money”

The CVS folks told me that this roll-out was “a complete free-for-all” with little information. Good luck out there

Anyway, while I was negotiating all that I got the updated vaccine. Yay!

Anyway, while I was negotiating all that I got the updated vaccine. Yay!

My wife and I got ours yesterday at a CVS. Didn’t hear about having to pay?

CVS didn't request my insurance.

I had covid in July. Some sources say wait two to three months. Some say five to six months. Some say if you're relatively young and healthy there's really no hurry at all. This is something I heard on NPR last week:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/09/13/1198803134/covid-boosters-updated-vaccines-fda-cdc

Anyway, I think I'm in the "no rush" category" and waiting until closer to December for the latest.

I wouldn't mix the serious and the tongue-in-cheek when it comes to COVID info. The CDC line is three months if you've gotten infected.

Doctors say they're finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish Covid from allergies or the common cold, even as hospitalizations tick up.

The illness' past hallmarks, such as a dry cough or the loss of sense of taste or smell, have become less common. Instead, doctors are observing milder disease, mostly concentrated in the upper respiratory tract.

"It isn’t the same typical symptoms that we were seeing before. It’s a lot of congestion, sometimes sneezing, usually a mild sore throat," said Dr. Erick Eiting, vice chair of operations for emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Downtown in New York City.

The sore throat usually arrives first, he said, then congestion.

The Zoe COVID Symptom Study, which collects data on self-reported symptoms in the U.K. through smartphone apps, has documented the same trend. Its findings suggest that a sore throat became more common after the omicron variant grew dominant in late 2021. Loss of smell, by contrast, became less widespread, and the rate of hospital admissions declined compared to summer and fall 2021.

Doctors now describe a clearer, more consistent pattern of symptoms.

"Just about everyone who I've seen has had really mild symptoms," Eiting said of his urgent care patients, adding, "The only way that we knew that it was Covid was because we happened to be testing them."

And:

Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, attributed the mild symptoms that doctors are seeing to immunity from vaccines and previous infections.

"Overall, the severity of Covid is much lower than it was a year ago and two years ago. That’s not because the variants are less robust. It’s because the immune responses are higher," Barouch said.

Other doctors think that omicron itself also changed the presentation of Covid symptoms, since some studies have shown that early versions of it weren’t as good as previous variants at infecting the lungs.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-symptoms-mild-follow-pattern-doctors-say-rcna105090

i am definitely coming down with something (two rapid tests negative so far) but i went ahead with flu and covid vaccination this morning. assuming tonight is going to be horrendous.

a friend got very sick recently, did multiple COVID tests, and yesterday was diagnosed with bird flu!

stay safe y'all

TIL that regular flu shots don't work on avian-transmitted varieties

holy shit, bird flu! omg :(

At our block party this past summer I was talking to my neighbor. I asked her where he husband was, and she said "oh, we have a trip coming up that requires a covid vaccine. He'd been putting it off because he's reacted so poorly to the past vaccines, but he finally got his shot today and is just kinda pushing through on the couch." Maybe an hour or so later he makes an appearance, and he seems kinda worse for the wear. He's wobbly and his color is off. "How's the vaccine going?" I ask him. "Oh, the vaccine is going OK," he says. "But I also took a bunch of mushrooms, so ... "

My wife and I got ours yesterday at a CVS. Didn’t hear about having to pay?

Here's the background:
https://www.timesunion.com/health/article/insurance-issues-lead-cvs-others-cancel-covid-18368441.php

As large retail pharmacies compete for market share in the latest COVID-19 vaccine roll out, it might be wise to hold off on making an appointment.

Chain stores like CVS and Walgreens ordered the new doses early, opening up vaccine appointments as early Saturday and Sunday. But by Thursday, many consumers in the Capital Region reported receiving calls from their pharmacists advising them to reschedule or risk paying $200 out-of-pocket for the immunizations.

A representative for CVS, which declined to make a pharmacist available for an interview, said some insurers are still updating their systems and may not yet be set up to cover the updated COVID-19 vaccines.

on a somewhat positive note, the latest wave, while still increasing in most regions, seems to have peaked/be on the decline in the South. Florida, for instance, has started to see hospitalizations decrease again, and the wastewater in the entire South has drastically declined.

hoping the other regions can get some relief soon, esp since more people inside due to the hot summer.

source: https://caitlinrivers.substack.com/p/this-week-in-outbreaks-september-4a5

xpost bureaucracy at its finest. I wondered how everything would run smoothly with such a short turnaround. answer: it didn't!

fwiw i got mine with an appointment at a CVS in NYC. they don't have and didn't ask for my insurance information and they didn't charge me.

a few walk-ins for flu shots asked if they could get it too while i was waiting, but were told CVS didn't have enough shots so they'd made it appointment-only until next week.

The updated covid vax is now available at many CVSs & Walgreens in NYC.

**These Rx chains are not supposed to charge you, regardless of insurance status.** They're in a federal program which covers those costs.

You can search for sites w/ no-cost vax at https://t.co/J6F9P3mf5Q pic.twitter.com/YX3hFteWKJ

— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) September 19, 2023

The federal program for no-cost vax is called "Bridge Access Program". You can select for this at https://t.co/J6F9P3lHgi and it will show you locations near you on the map.

— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) September 19, 2023